


If/Then

by Santhe



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abused Draco Malfoy, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Hermione Granger, Battle of Hogwarts, Book 6: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Book 7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Canon Compliant, Confused Hermione Granger, Dark Magic, Death Eaters, Developing Relationship, Draco Malfoy is a Little Shit, Everyone Needs A Hug, F/M, Harry Potter is a Good Friend, Hogwarts Sixth Year, Magical Accidents, Minor Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Mutual Pining, POV Draco Malfoy, POV Hermione Granger, Pining, Pining Draco Malfoy, Pining Hermione Granger, Second War with Voldemort, Secret Relationship, Slug Club, Somehow, Teenagers, Touch-Starved Draco Malfoy, canon compliance does not lend itself to happiness, except magic, gotta love pining, ish, they're bad at everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:54:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28642539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Santhe/pseuds/Santhe
Summary: Draco Malfoy skips a quidditch match; Hermione Granger pelts her would-be boyfriend's head with a very sharp flock of canaries. If an exhausted, arrogant, in-over-his head Slytherin were to stumble across a furious, sobbing, long-overlooked Gryffindor - what do you suppose would happen then?You deserve someone who wants you, you know.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy
Comments: 79
Kudos: 382





	1. If

It starts with a flicker of silver. The evening snowstorm paints the unlit corridor in navy blue, too dark to see someone approaching, too still to miss it. Hermione freezes, salty cheeks hidden behind cold fingers, and listens hard: a light scuffle over the stone floor, a soft swish of robes, a sharp exhale before the footsteps pause. 

She thinks it might be Harry. She knows it won’t be Ron. 

He’ll be too busy prying bird talons out of Lavender’s dainty little hair ribbons, she suspects. 

The prick. 

With a sniffle, she swipes a cold tear from the corner of her stinging eye and straightens her shoulders, a lecture about non-prefects being out of bed afterhours—even _if_ one is seeking to comfort a friend, even _if_ one is equipped with a map and a cloak and all manner of mischief-enabling contraband, and _especially if_ one is the “chosen one”—on the tip of her tongue. 

Instead of crooked glasses and wide green eyes, she’s greeted by a shock of blond hair and a flash of white teeth looming centimeters away in the dim hall. She yelps and reels back, skull colliding with the frozen windowpane behind her and knees slamming back against the cold sill. In a breath, she’s snatched her wand from the pocket of her jeans and wedged it under Draco Malfoy’s jaw. 

He tilts his chin, blue light casting stark shadows over his sneer. “Granger.” 

“Malfoy,” she snaps back, wincing and running her free hand over the abused back of her head. “Skulking about in the halls after hours again, I see.” 

“Strong words from someone skulking about on a windowsill after hours.” 

She scowls, biting back the lump in her throat and fighting to keep her wand perfectly steady against his neck. “I was not skulking—or sneaking up on people, I might add.” 

“Fine,” he purrs, blinking serenely down at her. Harry was right—between the hollow cheeks, shadowed eyes, and rumbled hair, he does look exhausted. Though he was pretty hollow-cheeked and dark-eyed to begin with. “Crying on a windowsill, then. I was only trying to phrase it more politely.” 

Heat rushes to her cheeks. _Boys._ “I was not cr—polite, really? If you start being _polite_ to me, Malfoy, we ought to have you shipped straight off to St. Mungo’s. Now—now go home, it’s after hours.” 

“Not that I hold a particularly high opinion of your character, Granger, but blatant hypocrisy seems a touch below your station, don’t you think?” He hasn’t bothered to step back from the vine wood biting into his carotid artery. 

He hasn’t drawn his own wand yet, either. 

She bites her lip, willing her spine straight. “Just—shove off, will you? It’s not exactly a good look for you, sneaking around all… suspicious.” Dragon bogies. She’s off her game. That bodes ill when threatening Slytherins. 

He presses forward, smirk growing; she leans back automatically, unwilling to poke an actual hole in his neck. Yet. 

“And why might that be, my dear Mudblood?” 

She growls, gaze flicking to the edge of his black sleeve before she can stop herself—it’s fast, but she knows he sees it when his eyebrow lifts, the rest of his features frozen in stone as he presses forward harder, straining her wrist, flexing his fingers. As if daring her to assume he can’t have his wand out fast enough to fight. 

She opens her mouth, torn between explaining that she doesn’t _actually_ think he’s a Death Eater and explaining why he might as well be. 

In the silence, his lashes flicker to follow her lips’ movement before he licks his own and says, “Well, then. If you won’t answer that one; perhaps another. What exactly is Gryffindor’s golden girl doing sobbing her eyes out after her _dear_ friends’ heroic win on the pitch? Shouldn’t she be off chaperoning parties or refuting blood status or snogging weasels, or whatever it is goody-two-shoes do to celebrate meaningless accomplishments?” 

Unbidden, the image of Ron’s fingers pressing into Lavender’s hair as his tongue slides against hers returns, backlit in golden firelight and roaring red whoops and whistles. The fool—wouldn’t even be on the team if it weren’t for her, and what does he care! Off he goes after Hermione’s silly, frivolous, useless roommate who’s barely _spoken_ to her since she dropped Divination, as if Lavender was even _interested_ in him before he was on the team and—and Ron just ate it up, didn’t he? Hermione had seen how pleased he was with her fawning in the Great Hall. She’d seen Ron look away from her. 

Malfoy clicks his tongue; she startles back to the immediate threat. “Oh, come now; have I hit a nerve? Weasel king not exceeding expectations, then? We’re all surprised you keep giving him chances, you know. He’s _spectacularly_ underqualified for, well, anything, really—but then, perhaps he’s _such_ a good lay you just can’t _bear_ to be parted?” She’ll curse him into oblivion, the loathsome git. He can twitch his fingers threatening towards his pocket all he wants; it won’t save him. “Or—perhaps he’s not ‘putting it in’ at all, if you catch my meaning. Is that it—still looking for someone to bed, and thinking little Weasley was a nice safe bet?” 

“Oh, _leave him be,_ he’s—” What is he? A disappointment, really, but that doesn’t exactly fit the tone. 

Malfoy chuckles and shakes his head, looming closer. “C’mon, Granger—that’s a pretty low rejection, I’ll admit, but you can do better than him. Now, _I_ wouldn’t think the uptight bookworm angle would be a winner for anyone, but you roped Krum in somehow, and I must say, he left a _spectacular_ review on that tongue—” 

She doesn’t mean to cast a spell, which is probably why it comes out so wrong—and maybe why he doesn’t even manage to lift his wand before it hits. One moment, white hot fingers and clenched knuckles; the next, he’s collapsing backwards with a soft whoosh, knees folding and neck searing without even a yelp. 

In the silence that follows, Hermione hears the wind pick up, peppering the windowpanes with icy snowflakes. Beyond her wand tip, Malfoy lies still and crumpled, eyes closed and pulse fluttering at her feet. A deep purple bruise radiates from the point where her magic touched his neck. 

Wand aloft in trembling fingers, she places her other hand over her mouth and counts slowly down from ten, grappling with the pulsing, rearing fury in her gut. Is this the sort of outburst that made Harry blow up his aunt? Perhaps she shouldn’t reprimand him about that next time. 

Slowly, she crouches by Malfoy’s head, watching for movement, holding back a new flutter of fear when none arises. But he’s breathing; he’s fine. It was just an outburst. Like the little songbirds pelting at Ron—just a stupid outburst. 

Cautiously, she traces her wand over the still-spreading bruise and breathes _“Reparifors,”_ hoping at least some of the extra time she’s put in learning healing spells since the fifth-year disasters has paid off. 

The border of the bruise wavers. She repeats the spell softly, watches a faint recession begin, chasing it down his jaw and out from under his collar, deep purple fading to mottled green under his pale skin. 

Malfoy whimpers. She jolts back—but it’s nothing, nothing, just a foreign, sleepy sound of relief. An out of place noise, for him. No matter. 

With the worst of the bruise reduced to a patch the size of her hand, she crabwalks back as far as she can before muttering _“Rennervate.”_

His grey eyes snap open in the flash of red light. She barely sneaks in a sigh of relief before he’s reeling back, snarling as he claps one hand over his neck and snatches up his wand with the other. 

She lets him. She could’ve easily unarmed him, sure, but if he’s stupid enough to attack he’ll get what’s coming to him. She doesn’t need to strike first. 

He rubs his neck and, wide-eyed, stares at her, still crouched against the wall. She blinks back, bouncing her wand lightly on her knee—just so he remembers it’s there. The long, cold minute stretches between them until her thighs burn from crouching before he finally mutters, “Damn, Granger. Didn’t think you had it in you.” 

“I swear, if you make one more comment about what I do or do not have in me, you’ll be unconscious till Christmas.” 

“You’ll let me enjoy Christmas? How sweet. What the fuck did you do to my neck?” He’s still teasing his fingers over the column of his throat, peering down and stretching and wincing, pointing his wand back at her half-heartedly. 

She swallows. “I, um… are you okay? I tried to… heal it.” 

He pauses his ministrations to squint at her, voice momentarily losing the trademark snide inflection in exchange for incredulousness. “Why?” 

Hermione pulls her eyes from the blot on his neck and finds that the new accumulation of snow casts fascinating shadows on the carpet between them. “What do you mean, why?” 

And the snark returns. “Oh, what could I possibly mean by that? Let’s see. ‘Why’ is a question typically posed to inquire as to the reason or purpose behind one’s actions; for example, _why_ are you crying on a windowsill, _why_ do you want Weasley to fuck you so badly, _why_ are you so twitchy about fucking in the first place, _why_ did Hermione Granger, of all people, lose control in this very corridor—” 

“That’s enough, Malfoy.” This is exhausting. Boys are exhausting. She wants to go home. 

If only Lavender didn’t live there. She groans and rubs her temple. 

He looks down at the fascinating carpet shadows, too. “Try it again, would you?” 

“What?” 

“Whatever healing spell you used. This burns like hell, and it’s your fault, so.” He shrugs. 

She swallows, weighs him being an absolute prick against him tattling on her. “Fine. Come here.” 

He raises an eyebrow, mutters “bossy,” and shuffles over to lean against the wall beside her anyway, tucking his wand away in the process. 

She shifts around to face him, folding her legs carefully to keep from brushing his, and catches her breath as her gaze trails from his extremely ruffled hair to his shadowed eyes, focused resolutely ahead. 

He smells very… sharp. Clean coins and copper and frost in the hemlocks. 

His jaw ticks and she shakes her head, sweeping up those thoughts and tossing them unceremoniously out before raising her wand and beginning to whisper incantations. _Reparifors_ seems tapped out, so she tries others, lacing together anything she knows to knit magically ruptured blood vessels cleanly back together. An excess of healing spells rarely hurt anyone, after all. 

The bruise finally begins to budge when she attempts a recent, more advanced find, trying to capture the flow of the thrice whispered _Vulnera Sanentur_ incantation as she traces the bloodstain. The spell flows like silver off her tongue; the tingle in her fingertips reminds her of sparking her warm, jar-held fires for chilly gatherings in the courtyard. 

Malfoy’s head falls back, lips parted in a silent moan of relief, and she watches with fascination as his skin swallows the purple bruise under clean, faintly mottled white. 

“Thank you,” he breathes, eyes closed and jaw relaxing. 

On a faint hunch, Hermione traces her wand up one last time before releasing the spell. She smiles faintly as the shadowy bruises under his eyes fade and vanish, too. He sighs and sinks back before jolting up and blinking at her. 

She drops her wand quickly, leaning back, looking away. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to hit you that hard.” After a beat, she adds, “But you did deserve it.” Hopefully he won’t ask what exactly she hit him with again. 

He chuckles, sound reverberating from deep in his chest, and she startles. The warm rumble is shockingly akin to a cat’s purr. She’s never heard him make any noise nearly so agreeable before—perhaps moments like this could help explain how he managed to have any friends? She’s been puzzling over that one for years. 

“That I did. Allegedly, anyway.” He sits up slowly, stretching his shoulders and flexing his fingers. “When did you become a healer, by the way?” 

As his gaze returns to her, she looks quickly away from the never-before-noticed nimbleness of his hands to her own fists folded primly in her lap. “Oh, in all my spare time. Just thought it might be useful.” 

His laugh rumbles again and she almost smiles, weaving her fingers tighter together as she tries to catalogue this one nice sound—just to hold onto for the next time he’s being horrible and she’s trying desperately not to hate him. 

A slim finger ghosts under her jaw and she jolts, eyes snapping up to find him a breath away and appraising her careful—grey eyes brushing over the curve of her nose, grey eyes dancing over the length of her neck, grey eyes resting over the part in her lips. His finger flexes, nail grazing the barest layer of skin under her ear. 

His focus is horribly honest. Without meaning to, she closes her eyes. 

A soft, patient brush as he tucks a single curl behind her ear. A jolt in her chest when she feels warm heat by her nose, his breath on her skin, his hand cupping her cheek. Copper and hemlock. 

His lips ghost against the shell of her ear, voice low and soft and rasping. 

“You deserve someone who wants you, you know. Even I know that.” 

He kisses her cheek. Then he lets her go. 

She doesn’t open her eyes until even the echoes of his footsteps have slipped from her ears. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> honestly I just think it's really funny that Hermione attacks Ron with an intricately conjured flock of songbirds. that may or may not have been the entire inspiration for this fic
> 
> at least one more full chapter (and possibly a couple shorter ones) to come! rated more for future than current content
> 
> kudos + comments + bookmarks are love <3
> 
> (ps: we are absolutely, positively, unconditionally opposed to intolerance and transphobia here - incredibly bummed out and frustrated by the prejudice displayed by the original series author, so we're gonna have an inclusive hogwarts whether she likes it or not)


	2. If - Aftermath

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: minor mention of past abuse

He traces the ghostly bruise on repeat. 

Ad nauseum, he runs fingers across his collarbone, into the divot of his throat, over the accelerating thrum of his artery, under the curve of his jaw. Shameless, deserved, unfamiliar—worlds away from the meaningless, careless curses and blows he learned long ago just to swallow. This one throbs differently—this one, he clings to. When he presses in, he still feels the burn; in moments of winter white sunlight, he draws the outline in the mirror, barely coherent, a requiem in waning indigo. 

It lingers for weeks. 

He pretends not to notice her glances, her stares and narrowed eyes and brushed back hair, in the halls and over meals and through the crowds. If he noticed, she’d stop. 

He thinks about forgetting it—the burn of her wand, the thrill of her reprimand, the whisper of her magic under his skin and the candor of her gaze when he touched her. It is apart from him, detached and irrelevant, corrosive and blue. His life has no space for tiny, delicate things. 

But oh, she trembled so. 

That was, perhaps, his greatest moment of restraint—merely brushing his lips against that which he wished to devour. Trembling under his fingers, and he let her go. 

Still, he tastes her, smoke and tea leaves, ink and wool. Still, he watches her—in the periphery, she crouches frozen as he slips away, she strides tall and alone through sunlit corridors, she tosses scarves over her shoulder and smiles without teeth, she runs her tongue over her lips in the library as she writes, as she thinks, as she paces out of reach. 

And oh, he wants. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> draco needs a hug and probably some therapy
> 
> thank you for reading, more substantial work to come !


	3. Then

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: minor mention of past abuse

It’s McLaggen who finally does her in. 

She lasts a whole month before she caves—a month of rustling up assignments not due until February, just so she’ll have sufficient excuses to stay in the library instead of the common room; a month of awkward, unwanted sympathy, ranging from Harry’s muffled “mmhmm”s and deeply wrinkled forehead to Ginny’s scornful snorts and Luna’s frustratingly consoling arm-pats; a month of pointedly ignoring Lavender straddling Ron every time she speeds through the Gryffindor tower into the girls’ dormitory, only to endure Parvati’s sidelong glances and, upon Lavender’s eventual return, the latter’s constant, contented sighs. 

A month of watching the pale bruise on Malfoy’s neck refuse to fade, his fingers running over its edges every time she spies him staring moodily out the windows or half-heartedly flipping through his reading. 

It’s all very distracting to study through. 

She’s already decided to just attend Slughorn’s party with Harry—half to save him from the illicit love potions and increasingly obsessive schemes of the fourth-year girls, half to make sure Dean doesn’t piece together why Harry’s constantly gazing after Ginny with his mouth half open—when Ron switches from awkwardly avoiding her to blatantly making fun of her. 

So, she invites Cormac McLaggen to the party—arrogant, rude, athletic, surprisingly popular McLaggen—just to watch the chaos. 

From the Ron perspective, the plan goes swimmingly; he actually stops snogging Lavender for a moment to ogle at her, and Ginny reports later that he spends the whole day questioning her about the legitimacy of her new beau. 

But here’s the thing. 

Despite Hermione’s strong distaste for practically every aspect of McLaggen’s personality, despite even the satisfaction to be gained from accepting his overeager advances—Hermione remains absolutely repulsed by the idea of kissing him. Even his grip on her waist as he parades her into Slughorn’s office is caustic, forcing her to spend the first half of the evening trying not to noticeably flinch and the second half darting from shadow to shadow like a frightened hare after he tries a bit too hard to shove his tongue down her throat. 

Which leads to the very logical, deeply confusing conclusion that she does not generally wish to be kissed, or even touched, by people she despises. 

Which further suggests that she does not, in fact, despise Malfoy. 

Slughorn’s Christmas party is far too deafening to sort out such issues. Tucked behind a hideous magenta tree draped in tinsel and swirling emerald scarves, she downs her glass of mead and gnaws at her lip, waiting for her opening, until Professor Slughorn slings himself over Cormac’s shoulder and pins him into an animated discussion between Luna and an exceedingly tipsy Trelawney. 

McLaggen is too spitting mad and determined to find her to be held still for long, so she takes the chance to dart out the door—without looking around for obstacles first. She barely manages to sidestep Filch, who is cackling with glee and towing a scowling Malfoy by the ear. 

They lock eyes for a heartbeat. 

Then the door slams and Hermione catches her breath. Practically blinded by the contrast between McLaggen’s predatory grip and… whatever that moment last month had been, she barely remembers to flee. 

(Which makes it McLaggen’s fault, then, that when Hermione remembers that she can’t go back to the dorm—because Ron’s there and she’s supposed to be reveling in someone “better”—she ends up wandering the castle instead, up and down the shadowed halls and eventually, inevitably, back to that cold blue windowsill, 

and there’s already a boy there, breathing hard, white knuckles braced against the window frame, sharp enough to blind and shattered enough to stare straight at her for the first time in days— 

McLaggen’s fault, that when all this leaves her standing in an empty room in a beautiful, wasted dress with a haunted, aching boy, she finally gives in to the incessant gravity gnawing at her periphery, the hunger snapping at her heels.) 

(He kisses like frostbite and leaves her with the sandpaper numbness of a burn on her tongue.) 

* * *

Hermione returns from the Christmas holiday a day early. Her parents have clients, and she can’t exactly practice spells at home, anyway. McGonagall authorizes her Saturday-evening return without question and helpfully answers all of Hermione’s questions about human transfiguration as she ushers her up to the empty Gryffindor common room. 

The lack of distractions starts as a welcome anomaly; she successfully changes her hair every color of the rainbow and back to its usual brown with only a half hour of practice (she decides quickly she would not make a good blonde, and no one can pull off the ginger hair like Ginny). 

Then she finds that when she’s already a month ahead on assignments, revising gets a bit boring without Harry’s company or the regular common room racket to scold. She could use a walk. Just to clear her head. 

Scratching under Crookshanks’s chin and shouldering her cloak, she climbs brisky down from the tower, through the discomfortingly quiet hallways, and out into the cold, pausing only to conjure a warm blue flame in her pocketed jar before exiting the courtyard. 

Breath opaque, she crunches through the snow around the castle perimeter, blinking up at clear white stars and cupping the fire to warm her fingers. She’s just turning back—because her toes are freezing and nothing good ever seems to happen out here at night and she’s finally finished up the bit of her mental to-do list that involves banishing any questionable inclinations about boys deep beneath the frozen surface of the lake—when she hears another pair of crunchy footsteps coming from the castle doors. 

She pauses, ready to flatten herself to the wall and vanish her footprints if it’s a professor, or to deliver an admittedly hypocritical rebuke if it’s another wandering student equally tired of the empty common rooms and lack of substantive homework. 

She nearly bites her own tongue off when she recognizes the narrow frame and haughty stroll of the actual culprit. 

He stops at the very edge of the faint blue halo emitted from her jar, just close enough that his clouded exhales are tinted teal. The bruise above his perfectly pressed color and narrowly knotted tie has finally faded to white and, despite the holiday, he’s somehow only grown thinner and paler since she last saw him. 

His eyes, though. Narrowed down at her, alive with silver, casting a flickering appraisal over her face. 

She opens her mouth to say—something about being out of bounds. Something about the weather, or Christmas, or anything other than the dull ache in her chest. 

His bare fingers, pale and shaking with the cold, stretch reflexively in response, and suddenly she hasn’t got one word to offer. 

His palms meet her waist in the same breath that hers find his collar, blue fire falling silently into the snow. Before she can breathe again, he’s kissing her lips bloody with her back against the stone, frost on his fingers and copper on his tongue. 

Shuddering in the evening air, snow falling into her boots, she can’t seem to do anything but cling to his neck as he moans against her teeth. Such an intimate noise for her to swallow; such an intimate twist of his fingers past her waistband—a pause to stare eye to eye for the first time in weeks, for her to tilt her chin and nod and snarl at the vicious heat—and his fingers slide past the ridge of her hipbone and oh, he has her now. 

Silent moments, kissing her like a man gone mad, twisting his hand and rutting against her hip. She’s already barely staying above water when his neck arches back, foreheads slotted suddenly together over black eyes just as he finally thrusts home. 

Her cry must get caught by the hand in her hair, must get tangled in the palm cushioning her skull from the stone as her head jerks back on its own accord, because somehow she’s silent—silent as he watches her with all the hunger of a starving man, silent as he snarls her offered hands away from where he thrusts against her thigh, in time with the patient, silent rhythm of his wrist. Knuckles in his shoulders, aching as his thumb pets, as he lifts her hips and she curls over to keen into that soft juncture over his collarbone. 

He kisses her temple before finally speeding up in earnest. She lasts three more strokes before letting go, silent, shattering, boneless and black, cradled under his jaw. 

Far away, damp fingers slide out of her; far away, he’s snarling her name against the shell of her ear like it hurts him, snarling and whining and cursing quiet as a secret as he pulls himself to completion with those same damp fingers. 

Then it’s just the two of them, leaning into each other and against a shadowed wall, gathering a fresh blanket of snow. 

He stands back slowly—only once the shaking stops. She stares at the wrinkles her teeth left in his collar. 

Straightening his shoulders and angling his feet back towards the entrance, he runs his tongue over his lips and settles his gaze somewhere near the top of her head. “Granger.” Cool, arrogant voice, with a sneer lurking below the surface. Like an empty greeting in the hallway. 

She stretches up on her toes, curls a first in his tie, and kisses him, hard and chaste. He jolts (but not away) before she stands back, wipes her lips on the back of her hand, and parrots back a cool “Malfoy.” Then she turns her heel, scoops up the flickering blue jar, and slips away. 

* * *

Malfoy stops calling her Mudblood. Harry keeps staring after Ginny like a lost puppy, and clings to that boneheaded potions book with impunity. Ron starts to shrink away from Lavender’s grasp, and Hermione keeps her nose well out of it. Buckbeak has finally settled back in with the flock. Life goes on. 

And yet. 

Malfoy catches her wrist while she’s replacing the only book in this damn library that bothers mentioning Horcruxes, presses her hips into the shelves, and bites a soft swirl of bruises above her shoulder. Malfoy shares a patrol with her and spends the entire shift arched against her in the Charms classroom, whispering furtive longings over the shell of her ear and mapping every line of her ribcage with the pads of his fingers. Malfoy slips into an alley ahead of them at Hogsmeade, cradles her spine through her jacket, and kisses her breathless, slipping away without touching bare skin once and somehow leaving her even more ruffled than usual. 

He barely lets her touch him back, and the faint smattering of bruises and scars she spies on the stripe below his hemline hints at why. Still, contradictory as he is, he always arches into her fingers in his hair and shivers when she clings to him. (She thinks it must be Bellatrix – his parents may be vile, but she’s never seen their cruelty directed at their son. She bites her lip and touches softly.) 

Life goes on, and the war gets worse. 

In March, Ron almost dies. Ron calls her name in his sleep. Lavender backs off, and in April, they finally break up and—he still doesn’t kiss her. 

_You deserve someone that wants you, you know._

In April, she’s alone in the library when he shows up red-eyed and frantic from Easter Holiday just to press his forehead into her shoulder, wrap his fingers around her wrist, and breathe. She casts non-verbal healing spells without knowing if they have a target and wonders if anyone has ever treated him softly. 

Weeks pass. Draco is afraid. She thinks she could help, if he let her, but he doesn’t, and he won’t, and he’s probably right. 

So instead, in May, she borrows the invisibility cloak and the Marauder’s Map from a sleeping Harry’s trunk to slip into the hospital wing and wait with him as she did with Ron, to trace _Vulnera Sanentur_ over the vicious legacy of _Sectumsempra_ and carefully ignore the sturdy bandage hiding his left forearm from prying eyes. 

It’s ending, now. She knows this. But still. 

She kisses him when he wakes up, the last night she’s there. It’s a different experience without his desperate grip on her shoulders or her hair or her hips. He smells more like blood and less like hemlock, these days. 

He lifts a hand when she starts to pull away, blinking up with those weary silver eyes and running the edge of his thumb over the ridge of her cheek bone, draws her down just close enough for her to hear his rasping, whispered voice in her ear. 

“In another life,” breathes Draco Malfoy, before letting her go. 

She’s still shaking when she gets home. 

She stares at her hands for hours before finally turning the tap on, scrubbing dried copper and fantom touches down the sink. 

In another life. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> background plot/timeline/context for seemingly odd details here are all drawn from the HBP book. if you're wondering why hermione's bluebell flame-in-a-jar is so heavily featured I don't know either it just kept coming up okay
> 
> one more short installment to come, thank you for reading <3


	4. Then - Aftermath

His hand trembles over the bottle’s seal, uncertainty catching on the ragged edges of his fingernails. Gritting his teeth, he forces the cap down with his palm and secures it with a whispered charm for good measure; the snarls of silver flickering and writhing inside that glass are for no one else. Not even him. 

She’ll figure out how to open it. If she wants to. 

He sets the displaced memories gently on the cluttered table before him, barely trusting himself not to drop them, not to shatter the vial and spill ghostly secrets down this cursed alleyway of old furniture, old trophies, old contraband. The Room would hold them for him, he supposes, hands braced along the table’s corroded edge. But they’re not really his to hold on to, in the end. 

The dark cabinet beside him rattles. One more spell, he thinks. Just one more, and he’ll be done. There’s a pending joy to this accomplishment—they didn’t expect he could do it, didn’t think he had the talent or the grit, and he’s shown them, and maybe it will be enough, and maybe his family—maybe. It should be a victory. He knows that. 

But surrounded by decaying shadows, sleepless and barely out of the hospital, a crumpled letter from his collapsing mother in his pocket and a spell poised to start a war on his tongue—it’s a bitter trade. 

He traces a hand over his shirt, following a practiced route along the new fissures crisscrossing his chest. Pansy had spotted that motion in the common room last week, had asked with a scowl why he kept lingering over the legacy of Potter’s fear—as if she had the slightest understanding, the faintest inkling of the soft, whispered touch he really clung to. He’d wrapped a hand under his jaw and told her to fuck off before slinking into the bathroom and retching from the pain of it all, ribs aching under the scars, fists clenched against the tiles. 

Which led to the debilitating realization that he wouldn’t be able to finish this with Granger in his head. 

So he’d taught himself this, too: how to pluck his brightest moments from his mind and trap them in a bottle. How to hide her, before someone broke through. Every fleeting touch, every whispered spell, every desperate kiss—collected and corked, now gripped in his sweating palms as he slips from the Room of Requirement for the second to last time. 

With that spark smothered, the slippery, shadowed magic of the Vanishing Cabinet had come into focus with startling clarity; curses once again fell from his wand with ease, a bare tinge beneath his sternum the only reminder of their cost. 

Despite encroaching finals, the library has been half-emptied by the temptations of a warm spring afternoon. It’s been weeks since the hospital wing, so he can’t exactly blame her for yelping when he yanks her behind the shelves (he should’ve covered her mouth, probably, but if he touched her mouth, he’d end up having to open the bottle all over again). 

She blinks up at him through the shadows, mute and questioning (but not fighting, still, not fighting him) as he presses the little leather pouch holding one scrap of paper and one dusty bottle and every moment he’d ever touched her into her palm. 

Even now—she’s such a tactile creature, leaning into his grip, thumb curling against his palm. For a moment, he holds it all: the delicate tap of her nail on his knuckle, the streak of honeyed sunlight dancing through her curls, the smattering of orange cat fur clinging to her sleeve. He sighs through his nose, unblinking, unfinished, and shies, for the first time, from her warmth. 

She’s going to cry, and he can’t take it. He pulls her hand to his mouth, brushes his lips against her fist, and goes, because he can’t see her face when she reads the shakily penned words, can’t know what she looks like after finding his memories surrendered, after reading _You don’t have to forgive me_ , or he’ll never be able to do what’s next. 

And he has let the demons in. 

* * *

(In a year: 

He’ll find himself in a room cluttered with shattered people and fluttering ash, the smell of death and his mother’s shaking hands clinging hard enough to bruise. His lungs will be full of smoke, and with every wracking cough, his father will grasp his shoulder without daring to meet his eyes. 

“Draco?” a small, hoarse voice will ask. 

He’ll jolt to his feet and stare without breathing at damp brown eyes, rimmed with ash and tears and blood. 

“I, um.” She’ll swallow, run her tongue over chapped lips and reach her hand inexplicably arm-deep into a tiny, beaded purse. “Now that…well. I wondered. I thought you might want these back?” 

She’ll withdraw dusty fingers and hold them out to reveal a tiny glass vial—swirling with silver, smudged with a year’s worth of fingerprints. The air will abandon his lungs all at once, as if she’d punched him in the gut, or whispered his name with her lips against his hair. 

It will double him over coughing, the ghost of fiendfyre burning from his diaphragm to his throat. 

She’ll be blinking fast when he’s able to meet her gaze again, when he reaches to grasp the vial and clings to her hand, too, steady and free and warm and alive. He’ll try to speak, to offer something, anything, but the space between will be too cavernous and bloody. 

He’ll tug at the pads of her fingers, instead, and she’ll shift a half step forward, raise her free hand to touch the stinging rip in his side, and that will be enough—enough that he can start to pull her closer, waiting achingly for her to spit and hit him and run, for her to cower from his touch and curse him into oblivion. 

And somehow, she won’t. 

“I’m sorry, Hermione,” he’ll say, soft as a shadow, with his cheek pressed to her hair and his wasted fingers clutching her spine. 

“I forgave you,” she’ll whisper, with her arms around his ribcage, holding his heart in. 

And maybe it won’t be the end, after all.) 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and now my quest for canon-compliant, at-least-a-little-bit-happy dramione can rest... thank you for reading !


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